Native vegetation area
Native vegetation area—also known as vegetation extent—refers to the extent of native vegetation covering an identified area on your property. According to the Australian Native Vegetation Assessment 2001, 18 per cent (30.4 million hectares) of Queensland's native vegetation has been cleared, mainly in the coastal lowlands and floodplains from Cairns south to the New South Wales border and in the inland Brigalow Belt. Retaining, maintaining and restoring an adequate proportion of native vegetation on properties and across catchments and regions are a national natural resource management priority.
Monitoring native vegetation area involves mapping the boundaries and location and calculating the current area of each site of native vegetation on your property. Monitoring the long-term change in the native vegetation area on your property will give you an indication of whether the area of native vegetation is increasing, decreasing or remaining static. It will also give you an indication of the impacts of your management actions. After mapping your native vegetation and collecting data long-term, you will be able to obtain:
- initial (baseline) information on the location, boundaries and area of native vegetation on your property including grassland, shrubland and remnant vegetation
- trend data relating to changes in the area of native vegetation
- information on how you are progressing towards any vegetation area targets
- a series of Geographic Information System layers or plastic map overlays, showing your progress against targets
- information to develop management strategies that maintain a target area for the vegetation on your property.
Download the following files for more information.
- Land Manager’s Monitoring Guide—Native vegetation area indicator (PDF, 267K)*
- Datasheet templates (PDF, 44K)*
- Datasheet templates (Excel, 55K)‡
* Requires Adobe Reader
‡ Requires Microsoft Office files viewer
Last updated 7 September 2010
